enough suitable men for the ships that bridge the now familiar worlds. So familiar, I could fly to the rings of Saturn or to dark Nyx in my slumber.”
“Then you also must also feel a sadness because there will be no more stones to pluck from a new planet,” Mr. Sanchez said. “Perhaps there is a thirteenth yet to be found.”
“No, Papa. It is certain. There are no more children of our sun. But I am not sad. The stones are not finished. Mama shall have other pretty baubles to be caged in fine silver or gold and hung about her neck.”
*
Mrs. Sanchez was programming a day of cooking and baking on the autochef. At her son’s words her hands poised in mid-flight over the console. She did not quite comprehend but an intuitive wisp of alarm darkened her face.
She turned to her husband, as if for some reassurance that her dread was of no substance.
Mr. Sanchez said in perplexity, “I do not understand, Roberto. If there are no more planets—”
“In this system!” Roberto said.
Neither of his parents said a word. They stared at him and waited.
“In a few days it will be officially announced,” Roberto said. “With the perfection of the new Korenyik propulsion, a starship will be built. A starship! And I have been selected to take it through the other space to Alpha Centauri.”
Mr. Sanchez embraced his son. “Roberto, I am so proud.” He turned to his wife. “Is it not a great—” He stopped at the look of her.
“This Alpha Centauri,” she said, pronouncing it badly, “it is a planet?”
“It is a star, Mama. Like our sun. It may have a family of planets. It will be exciting to discover them.”
“Why?” she asked with a mother’s quiet challenge.
The word echoed in Roberto’s mind—why? The very core of his being strained to shout out why. Space was why! Each blazing star was a compelling, beckoning finger. Every constellation a covenant with his heart. And somewhere out in the majestic, wheeling Galaxy his soul wandered, waiting for him to come.
“Mama, I will show you why,” he replied as quietly. “As I promised Papa the last time, I have borrowed from the company a star projector. This time you must put aside the household and watch and listen and learn something about the universe out of which my life and my dreams are made. Of all your children I am the only stranger to you. And before I go out to the stars I want you to know something of that which fills my heart.”
He went to his room and returned with a foot-square case which he set on a table in the living area. He pressed a stud. A transparent globe inflated over it to a four foot diameter. He dimmed the lights, manipulated the controls and a tiny sun burned in the center of the globe. Another adjustment brought into view the solar planets orbiting around it. The device was an educational tool; it projected as desired, within the envelope of gas, three-dimensional mockups of the solar system, star clusters and galaxies that moved almost as incandescently beautiful as the originals.
Mrs. Sanchez was delighted with the views of the solar system and the surface scenes of the various planets. She had as much general knowledge of the planets as she had of India or France—which had all come to her through the distorting medium of television dramas. The moon had observatories and mad scientists; India had elephants and sinister maharajas; Mars had deserts and fragile ghost people; Venus had quinquaños and swamp dragons; and France was overflowing with sin.
Roberto did not utilize the projector narrative. He explained with his own intense words as he took his parents across the gulf to the constellations. He skipped about the Galaxy, astounding them with the sheer billions of stars. He insinuated the possibility of millions of inhabited planets and then he flung them across the abyss of space to view the Local Group of the Milky Way, its sister Andromeda and the satellite galaxies. Then he plunged them into infinity for a time-lost glimpse of the billion other galaxies thus far discovered.
*
The globe deflated, the lights went on and Roberto leaned toward his mother. “Does not the thought of all this catch at your heart a little?”
There was an uncertainty in her voice that Roberto missed because he was so intent upon her answer. “All those stars,” she said. “Something like that I saw once on the television—about strange people who lived on those stars. I did not like it very much. Perhaps because it is not true.”
“Not true?” Roberto echoed. “Yesterday, yes. Today, not quite. Tomorrow ... your own son is going to the stars!”
“It is beyond my understanding why men cannot be content to remain where they were meant to be.”
“But the stars were meant for us. They are our destiny!” Roberto realized he was speaking too loudly.
Mrs. Sanchez looked squarely at her son. Her words were measured and solemn like some solitary, tolling bell. “If God meant us to be on those stars he would have put us there. Roberto, take care. Listen to the word of your mother. I have not the cleverness of my children but I know things here.” She touched her hand over her heart. “It may be as you say, all the millions of great stars. But they are God’s high places and I tell you, my son, whoever dares violate them will be struck down.”
“But, Mama! In ancient times, when man first took to the air, there were those who proclaimed man presumed too much and would be punished. And a thousand years ago there were people who spoke as you do when man first went into space. They too said God gave us the earth and to covet the moon and the planets was a grievous sin.”
Mrs. Sanchez shrugged. “There are always the fanatics. Your mama is not one of them. God gave men the sun and the moon and the planets and set them apart from the stars for him to work out his salvation. It is natural and right.”
“And he did not give us the stars also?”
“In the sky He put them as a testament to His glory. You have shaken my poor head with the measure of their distance. But it serves to show that they would not have been placed out of reach if they were intended for us to have.”
“But Mama, soon they will no longer be out of reach. Your own son will go to the first one in a great new ship.”
Mrs. Sanchez turned troubled eyes on her son. “I will pray for you.” She averted her face and would no longer look directly at him.
Roberto angrily snatched up the star projector and went to his room.
His father followed. “You must understand,” he said, “your mother is a simple woman. She would rather think of the stars as the lamps of the angels than the huge blazing spheres that they are.”
“I do understand,” Roberto said bitterly. “I have heard her words a thousand times from as many mouths. They have sounded through history and are chains meant to bind man to his few worlds. It is the eternal voice of the heavy, peasant mind which tries to shout down every soaring dream of mankind.”
“Your words are too hard,” his father said.
Roberto’s lips curled to say something cruel but he refrained, not wanting to hurt this fine, little man whose blood was his own.
“Yes,”
